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ARM research extended
down under to Darwin

Darwin, Australia, is the location of the latest research site for the U.S. Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurment (ARM) Program. The site is the third Atmospheric Radiation and Cloud Station established in the Tropical Western Pacific region of the program.

GLOBAL COLLABORATION – Groups of international scientists and government officials attended the July 30 Darwin Atmospheric Radiation and Cloud Station dedication ceremony.

ARM also operates research sites in the U.S. Southern Great Plains and North Slope of Alaska. Argonne manages all of these sites for the program, whose goals include improving our understanding of how clouds and atmospheric moisture interact with solar radiation and the effects of these interactions on climate.

Operational since April 2002, the Darwin site was officially dedicated on July 30. It is a collaborative effort between the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's Special Services Unit.

The site features state-of-the-art instrumentation to measure solar radiation and surface radiation balance; cloud parameters; and standard meteorological variables such as temperature, wind speed and direction, atmospheric moisture, precipitation rates, and barometric pressure.

Data from the site are transmitted to the United States for further processing and archiving with data from the other ARM sites. All ARM data are freely available via the Internet to the public and the worldwide scientific community.

"The Darwin site offers a logistically friendly area that experiences a period of extreme dryness, followed by a long monsoonal rain period," said ARM Operations Manager and Argonne researcher Doug Sisterson. "The transition between the periods provides abundant convective cloudiness. The measurements in Darwin are representative of much of the coastal regions in the tropics." – Donna Jones Pelkie

For more information, please contact Donna Jones Pelkie (630/252-5501 or djpelkie@anl.gov) at Argonne.